Have you ever made a palette from a photo on ColourLovers? This tutorial is somewhat along the lines of that and it’s really easy! This works great for grabbing colors of a header or etsy banner to make a web design that matches the colors in the image. All you have to do is open a photo or design in photo shop and then go to the file menu>File>Save For Web & Devices and then choose PNG8 or GIF as the image type.
You will then see a color table displayed in the window after choosing PNG8 or GIF. Click on the little button to the right of the color table where there’s a triangle and horizontal lines. At the bottom of this menu there’s an option that says “Save Color Table”.
Saving Your Swatch:
You can save it to the predefined directory, which is will be something like: C:\Users\(Your User Name)\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Optimized Colors. I prefer to save my swatches and color tables in their own directory, so when I need to load them I don’t have to root around in my system to grab them quickly. You won’t have to actually save the image, just the ACT file.
Next Step: Load Your Swatch
If you don’t know where your swatch window is, from the file menu go to Window>Swatches. In the swatch window, click on the small arrow with the lines next to it.
Select “Load Swatches”, then choose “.ACT” from the dropdown menu and load as shown in the screen shots below.
You will now see the new colors in your swatches window.
Image Credit
